Through A Different Lens

Have you ever stood on a city sidewalk, waving your arms frantically, trying to hail a taxicab, only to have empty cab after cab rush right past you as if you were invisible?  Have you ever walked into an upscale hotel, dressed in fully professional business attire, and been stopped by a hotel staff member inquiring as to “and what is your business here today?” while your colleague in tattered jeans and T-shirt passes right through unimpeded?  Have you ever gone shopping in an expensive store, only to notice that a sales clerk was following and watching your every move, however seemingly “discreetly”?  Have you ever been stopped by a police officer while driving your car, and immediately had to reach back and remember all of those life training lessons from your parents: don’t talk back; don’t move suddenly; never reach into your pockets or jacket unless instructed to do so; do whatever you are told?  Have you ever sent out your resume countless times with no answer, and then dropped the “s” from your first name (“José”) to Anglicize it (“Joe”), only to then be flooded with responses and interview offers?  And what is the common link in each of these situations, and no doubt many others?  In each instance, the individual in question is African-American.  These are the shared experiences that virtually every Black American, especially males, has experienced in some form or another.

This fall, millions of White high schoolers will experience a familiar rite of passage: submitting application packages to colleges.  Unsure of what school(s) to choose; anguishing over whether they will be accepted.  All following a path that is assumed to be “normal and expected” for their age group.  Millions of Black and other minority students will not be making these assumptions.  The thought of going to college is not even on their radar, a possibility so remote that it invites little serious thought.  Just getting through high school is an admirable enough accomplishment.  But first in the family to go on to college?  Unlikely.  What family role model even exists to guide and stimulate that student, show her the ropes, help with her finances, help her believe?  For these millions, their circumstances create a far different rite of passage.

Michael Brown, of Ferguson, MO, may not prove to be the most ideal face for the cause of racial justice in America.  That judgment awaits the results of various in-depth investigations in process by multiple agencies.  It should certainly not be determined by the wild posturing of many news organizations covering the case, or the self-promoting individuals attaching themselves to his death.  Whatever Michael Brown’s personal character turns out to be, it likely did not warrant multiple bullets into his unarmed body.  From a police department that is the complete racial opposite of the population it serves.  In the year 2014.

50 years after Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act, liberal and conservative White Americans still do not understand the perceptions, experiences, and everyday realities of Black (and other minority) Americans.  The divide is still there.  And the misunderstandings run both ways.  As a whole, White Americans will never condone, much less support, violent rioting no matter what the perceived cause or justification.  Black Americans experience such violence as a pressure valve that can no longer hold back the pent-up fury over unceasing separate and negative treatment, the failure of genuine social and legal colorblindness.  White Americans decry the pattern of Black rioters taking out their vengeance on Black neighborhoods and fellow Blacks – stupidly ignoring the fact that Black neighborhoods are where the Black people are!  Anger – pushed to violence – is a non-logical and emotional reaction that reaches out where you are, immediately in the moment.  (Which is why domestic violence against loved ones inexplicitly happens as it does.)

Many participants and observers in Ferguson have decried the military-styled presence brought in to “restore law and order.”  Heavy-duty weapons, armored vehicles, and guarded checkpoints to control access, most often enforced by young adults with minimal training for such a tense environment.  “How can this happen in America?” is the anguished, questioning plea.  Yet for those of us who grew up in the beginnings of modern civil rights violence, the scene in Ferguson was all too familiar.  Detroit, Los Angeles, Selma, Little Rock – and even more names from earlier battles, now lost to the archives of old newspaper headlines.

If we are going to denounce the violence of the protesters, then let us also denounce the violence of the unjust treatment that perpetuates it.  If we insist on faulting Black Americans for not “acting like White Americans” or not “thinking as White Americans think,” then let us start treating Black Americans the same way as we treat White Americans.  Colorblind treatment yields colorblind outcomes.  But poor schools produce poor adult workers; poor households create future poor families; home without books create undereducated readers.  Hostility and discrimination create imitated hostility and discrimination to others yet again.  The repeated cycle never stops.

In the past 60 years, we have made great progress towards the goal to end racial discrimination in America.  Progress that should neither be ignored nor diminished.  The world of equality and opportunity is very different than from where we started in 1950s Little Rock.  Perhaps amazingly so, given the usual time it takes to change people’s hearts and their society.  Even doing “the obvious right thing” sometimes takes much effort and many years.

We are not at the endpoint of our goal yet.  Getting to that place requires that we see differently than we see today.  If we want other people to act like the people in our neighborhood, then we have to let them live with us in our neighborhood.  Both our physical neighborhood and our social/economic neighborhood.  Until we have a common perspective and experience, or at least a shared understanding of our differences, we will never have common outcomes.  It is a shared commonality among our peoples that we still have yet to achieve.  Until the “haves” of White America truly understand the wholly different thinking of the “have nots” of minority America, our shared commonality and mutual relationships will remain elusive.  And the promise of American opportunity for all will similarly remain elusive.

This is not an “apologist” point of view that condones violence and blames “society” for individual ills.  We are each charged with responsibility for how we respond to our circumstances and the events that come our way.  And there are countless examples of those who, with hard work and opportunity, have successfully transcended extremely adverse circumstances and events.  But we should be slow to criticize what we have minimal understanding of.  We are obligated to get the knowledge first, to take the time to be able to appreciate what has led each of us to this circumstance in our life and to this perspective in our thinking.  Only from such knowledge and appreciation can we then offer effective alternatives and solutions that come from genuine, informed insight.

©  2014   Randy Bell                          www.ThoughtsFromTheMountain.blogspot.com

Humanity's Inhumanity

A friend recently pushed a book into my hands with a directed instruction to “read this.”  “Unbroken,” by Laura Hillenbrand (author of the best-selling book – and subsequent movie – “Seabiscuit”) is the powerful, moving, disturbing, and inspiring biography of Louis Zamperini (1917-2014).  A boyhood product of the Depression era, Louis was an incorrigible rebel who turned his life around as a teenager and became an internationally-known distance runner in college and the 1936 Olympics.  World War II ended his athletic ambitions, drawing him into the South Pacific as a bombardier in the war with Japan.  Following his plane’s crash into the water, he and his pilot friend drifted a record-breaking 47 days on a barren rubber life raft, only to be captured by the enemy Japanese.  Given up as “killed in action,” what followed was two years as a POW, suffering through the most unimaginable cruelty and torture – physical and mental – that human beings can inflict on one another.  The triumph of his physical survival was trumped by his post-war descent into PTSD – a national celebrity transformed into alcoholism, rage, poverty, near-divorce – until he finally made peace with his torment and his tormentors.

This biographical narrative is really two stores inside one cover binding.  On the one hand, it is a testament to human beings’ strength of Will and ability to survive against the depths of the most acute cruelty.  When that Will triumphs, our respect for the human spirit leaps forward, and the human species advances to yet another level.  But we are also reminded that, after thousands of years of human development, growth, knowledge and rationality, human beings can also operate as one of the lowliest species on earth.  Able to attack and kill other beings simply for the sake of doing it, rather than out of genuine need for survival.

World War II seems almost as ancient history to many of us, but it occurred only 70 years ago.  One lifetime.  My lifetime.  To younger Americans, it is simply one chapter in their school history book, important to memorize but of little relevance to today’s life.  When most Americans think of WWII, thoughts are generally of Nazi Germany and the European war, more predominately perpetuated in the films and literature of post-war America.  The Pacific war is typically skipped over.  But the unfathomable crimes against POWs and civilian populations across Asia were as horrific in their own way as the carnage perpetrated in Europe.  And in both theaters of war, racial arrogance was the parent of that comprehensive carnage.

Nazi Germany was the supposed “superman” of human development, the Aryan (White) perfection of the human race.  From that thinking, the elimination of the lesser elements of the human race – by war and by mass executions in the Holocaust – was an easy step.  Similarly, the arrogance of the Japanese military ruling class and their self-view of racial perfection over all other Asians – notably the Chinese and Koreans – allowed them to treat those lesser beings as mere props supporting their dominance.  Conscience and humanity towards others disappeared from the social fabric.  But there was one marked difference between Germany’s and Japan’s arrogance: Japan extended its captured POWs and enslaved labor no mutuality of wartime respect.  1% of American POWs in German captivity died; 37% of American POWs in Japanese captivity died.  Louis Zamperini managed to survive that grim statistic, even if only in body and not in mind.

So what does a horror of cruelty “so long ago” have to do with our lives today?  Simple.  Not much has changed since then.  Yes, war in Europe, a constant state for 1000 years, has been virtually eradicated.  No small accomplishment.  Yet the violence of war continues elsewhere.  But beyond war itself is the continuing inhumanity of cruelty, the wanton killing, the killing for intimidation to create power.  It is the killing from generations of handed-down hatred whose original source has long been rendered irrelevant.  So we have the attempted “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia; the carpet-bombings and “Agent Orange” in Viet Nam; the various ethnic slaughters across Africa; the perpetual state of recurring killing between Palestinians and Israelis; the fratricidal conflicts within Islam in post-Saddam Iraq; the indiscriminate killings in the Syrian revolution; and now the wholesale slaughter of anyone in its conquering path by ISIS in the old Middle East Crescent.  These are deaths not from “normal” war casualties, but from an abject indifference to the value of human life.  A state of mind less than those supposedly “inferior” animal minds that live in the jungles of the wild.

Why human beings are in such a rush to not just kill each other, but to do so in as painful and indiscriminate way possible, is near impossible to understand.  Are we still, after all of these centuries, still that afraid of each other?  Afraid of different opinions, religious beliefs, cultural practices, ancestral history, personal lifestyles, and genders?  Still trying to dominate others to mitigate our fear of them rather than coexisting with them?  Still killing each other over long-dead disagreements and birthrights originally fought hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago?  Does each party to this inhumanity still think it is the true victim, the aggrieved party, who therefore must now be committed to ever-lasting revenge?  Who really struck the first blow?

By October, 1949, Louis Zamperini had reached the depths of descent from national war hero and celebrity to alcoholic, his marriage in shambles with divorce papers in process.  Somehow, his wife nevertheless convinced him to go hear some unknown preacher then in town conducting open-air services under a big tent.  Louis went, but bolted out panicked before the end of the service.  She convinced him to return again another night, and he started to race out once again before the end.  But just before reaching the exit, a quiet voice inside of him echoed his words said during those many desperate days in his life raft, floating day-after-day seemingly to nowhere on the ocean currents, when he prayed out loud: “If you will save me, I will serve you forever.”  In that instant of remembrance, Louie recognized that part one was done – he had been saved.  Now it was payback time, because his life had become anything but “serving.”  Instead of leaving, he turned around and walked to the front of the tent, the tent where Billy Graham’s now-famous Los Angeles religious crusade first created national headlines and made Graham a lifetime religious celebrity.  In that instant, Louis Zamperini forgave his tormentors, turned loose his hatred, ended his nightmares of POW torture, gave up his thirst for revenge, and moved into the lifetime of positive service he had promised to his faith.

In the midst of continual inhumanity, we can still find our humanity.  Sometimes it is in the most unlikely places, at the most unlikely time.  It is only in this facing, and acknowledging, of our own inhumanity that we can thereby then find our own humanity, and let the past be past.  At the personal level; at the collective, national level.  One person at a time, one step at a time, one lifetime at a time.  And so civilization glacially crawls forward, moving inches in the continuous days after days.  In times such as these, discouragement at the human condition can be understandable.  The Louis Zamperinis remind us why we hold on to hope.  And why we continue to keep stubbornly inching our way forward.  One painful, beautiful step at a time.

©  2014   Randy Bell              www.ThoughtsFromTheMountain.blogspot.com

Demonizing The Poor

What is it about poor people that makes us so uncomfortable?  Or perhaps, even, outright angry or hostile?  We walk past the homeless person on the street, barely seeing or acknowledging his existence.  We resent the mother in the supermarket paying for her groceries with food stamps.  We object to providing our tax money to fund the welfare check that goes out to the family below “the poverty line.”  We resent our having to work while the government supports the unemployed who are not working.  We take a wide roller brush and paint all welfare recipients as deadbeats living on the dole; people receiving unemployment benefits as lazy bums defrauding the system; the homeless as morally irresponsible who have given up on their responsibilities to society; and gangs of inner-city youths as drug dealers and criminals.

Truth is, there are individuals in each of these groups that fit these stereotypical profiles.  As there are always given individuals that fit any kind of racial, religious, gender, sexual, economic, geographic, or other life-style stereotype.  Just as there are also many individuals in these groups who defy the stereotype, who operate independently of the circumstances that surround them.  The parent working 2-3 jobs who nevertheless still lives below the poverty level.  The inner-city youth going nights to community college to train for a job and thereby have a way out of the gang.  The homeless mother living in her car with her children, trying to hold the family together however possible.  The business professional still sending out resumes, attending job fairs, going in for interviews, who has not given up in spite of depleted savings accounts.  As any social or charity worker can tell us, for every story of fraud and failure, there are other stories of human determination and perseverance, of courage overcoming adversity.

Yet we live comfortably in our painting from our broad brush.  Or we make ourselves comfortable with leaving the reality of poor people to the responsibility of social service and charity workers, thankfully out of our sight.  Where does our blindness come from?  Is it that knowing “there but for the grace of God go I” makes us so insecure?  Does a part of us intuitively know that the fairy tale of our life that we have worked so hard to construct could so easily collapse upon the smallest turn of Life?  Does disparaging “the poor” allow us to mask an underlying prejudice of yet another, far less acceptable kind?  Is it that the arrogance of our success, and the effort we have put into achieving it, makes us forget how “lucky” we in fact have been, and how much help we had in achieving that success?  (Three or four “big star actors” may have drawn us into the movie theater, but the list of “credits” at the end of the movie goes on seemingly continuously.)

We exhort the unemployed to “just get a job,” yet most major corporate employers choose to cut jobs as their first solution to threatened profits.  We tell young people to “get an education,” yet state and local governments are cutting educational funding at every opportunity.  We tell the welfare mother to get out of the house and act responsibly for her children, yet we cut food stamp spending, prevent access to affordable health care insurance, and cut funding for child care support.  We need not reward indolence, but we should not punish acts of responsibility, if not courage.  For all the hard work we may feel we have done to arrive at where we have come, there are many poor who are working as hard in their circumstances just to maintain where they have managed to come.

In the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney was taped rabble-rousing a millionaire’s gathering about “the 49%” of Americans living on the public dole, expecting to be taken care of by government handout.  It played well to an audience hungry to believe that divisive electioneering.  Only later was the question raised as to WHO these 49% actually are.  And it turned out to include such people as retirees otherwise solely dependent upon their social security to survive.  Children unable to provide for themselves.  Military families struggling with low pay for extraordinary services rendered.  Disabled Americans struggling to get through the day while facing limited access.  Interestingly, the 49% did NOT include, for example, government contractors selling overpriced and/or unneeded products and services in the name of “saving jobs” (i.e. saving profits by corporate welfare); college professors living off of questionable research grants; state/local governments with palms constantly extended pleading for funding awards; or CEOs receiving hidden tax credits for their company’s special benefit (while tax credits for the poor are being cut).

Certainly punish the individual defrauders and abusers with the full force of the legal system.  But let us not slander all of a group for the callous, despicable actions of the individuals.  Lest all of us who are fortunate to live outside of poverty get painted with a similar broad brush.  (Witness the abuse of 300 doctors arrested last year for Medicare fraud and for supplying drug dealers with pills for illegal resale.  Or the financiers and mortgage lenders who defrauded the home-owning public and wiped out significant portions of the American economy.)  We should react to real individual people, not group labels.

Before we demonize the “Medicaid dependent,” let us think about the working poor paid a wage we ourselves would never accept.  Before we demonize the “unemployed bums,” let us think about the desperate breadwinner with the battered self-esteem from countless interview rejections because she is over 50.  Before we demonize the “food stamps recipient,” let us think about the military wife or the senior citizen who cannot afford the inflated grocery prices created by the “big Agri” food producers.  Before we demonize “the welfare mom,” let us think about all the dependent children, older parents, and others who she may be caring for in her home.

Each of the three great Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – exhorts us to look out for “the widow, the orphans, and the poor.”  We all share in that responsibility, and other responsibilities in situations where help is needed.  We meet that responsibility through our individual actions, our religious and charitable affiliations, and – when scale or efficiency deems it appropriate – through the mechanisms of our shared government.  But our actions are preceded and guided by what we think.  So it is by what we think, more than our actions, that we will ultimately be tested and judged.  Hopefully we will not be found as poor in our thoughts as the economically poor we excoriate.

© 2014  Randy Bell                www.ThoughtsFromTheMountain.blogspot.com

Immigrants Unwelcome

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.  The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.  Send these, the homeless, the tempest tossed.  I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”  (Inscription on our Statue of Liberty)

America has always been built on its cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity.  All of us here today are derived from “outsiders” who came here to start a different kind of life than they previously had.  Some groups have immigrated in slow but steady movement over time; other groups have come in concentrated waves.  While we have been welcoming on the one hand, we have also been restrictive by instituting immigration quotas.  These have often been tailored and directed at particular groups favored or unfavored, reflecting then-current racial or cultural prejudices.  Our immigration history is not always a flattering picture, in spite of Lady Liberty’s inspiring words and our preferred self-image.

For the past 20 years, we have struggled with Mexicans (and more recently, masses of unaccompanied Central American children) illegally crossing our border to seek a better life for themselves and their families.  Some of these immigrants are bad characters living crime-infused lives who need to be dealt with accordingly.  But many have settled into quiet, productive, self-supportive lives, pursuing the American Dream and raising their children as any other responsible American does.  Except that they are not legal citizens due to their illegal entry.  And that is the crux of this unresolved problem hopelessly lost in petty politics for a generation as politicians on the left and right look for reelection votes from their hardcore constituencies.

By some estimates, there are over 10M illegal immigrants in America.  They live in a never-never land of ambiguity, unable to pay for the services they receive because they live a denied existence.  Those who are social or criminal misfits should be prosecuted accordingly and then deported.  That is the easy part.  But for the majority of illegals conducting themselves responsibly, there is simply no way America is going to round them up, pack them into trailer trucks, and drive them back across the border.  Those who advocate for that course need to get over any expectation of that happening.  Instead, we need to buck up, quit complaining, quit the partisan blame-game and finger-pointing, and move forward with the best solutions possible.  The only practical recourse for us now is to assimilate these people into American society.  End their “illegal” status, bring them out of the shadows, and properly enroll them onto the employed tax rolls to pay for their government benefits.  For this, we need a new “green card” kind of status similar to that available to many other employed non-citizens.  Thereby, end the threat of prosecution that keeps these people living in fear and uncertainty in the shadowed underbelly of our society.

But permission to live and work in America is not citizenship.  Those who protest against a full pardon and a “pathway to citizenship” are correct: these immigrants broke the law by the manner in which they came.  So forgiveness without prosecution – yes; pardon – no.  Green card to work – yes; citizenship – no.  For full citizenship rights, it is reasonable to get back in line, wait your turn, and retroactively complete the standard legal process.  Just like everyone else.  This is a fair compromise for all.

In the meantime, we need to revise our immigration rules to reflect today’s workforce needs.  We have high-tech, talented foreign graduates educated in our colleges with much to offer the American economy – graduates that we force to leave America and take their talents back home.  This is absurd, stupid and self-defeating.  Also, we have jobs going begging in certain industries (e.g. factory production, agriculture, construction) which illegal immigrants are already partially filling.  Both the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and major labor unions have actually agreed on how to solve this need.  Frankly, the employers and everyday citizens among us who are employing these immigrants are as culpable for our immigration problem as the immigrants themselves.  If we are looking to deport the illegal immigrant, let us also jail their employers.

The children of these illegal immigrants are a special case.  When a parent robs a store of food for his children, we put him in jail.  We do not pass on “the sins of the father” to his children; we do not put his children in jail for eating the food.  The children of these immigrants know only America as their home.  We need to welcome them home without further pseudo-indignant grandstanding.  For this piece of the problem, this is the compassionate America we claim to be.

That said, the current tidal wave of Central American children coming across the border is a different case.  Certainly by all reports these children are highly at-risk in their home country.  The 2008 law enacted near-unanimously by Congress and President Bush mandating placing such children with available relatives or adoption needs to be our first choice – it is the law.  But where no such option exists, the remaining children need to be sent back home.  They are in no position to be self-supporting here, and America is simply not capable of absorbing and providing custodial support to this volume of inflow – no matter how compassionate we may try to be.  Treat these innocents well while they are temporarily in our care.  But we have to send the strong message to families and governments back home that America cannot be the world’s foster home for the maltreated.  America needs to have an open door; but it does need a door.

Once we make headway at ameliorating our current mess, we need to avoid a future repetition.  Correcting our immigration rules and quotas is one step on that direction.  Strengthening our border protections is another: fences, other physical barriers, radar detection, manpower and enforcement.  These are things that need to be done.  But the $40B appropriation passed by the Senate in order to get a Democratic and Republican compromise is absurd.  To claim that reducing Washington’s budget is a top priority, while cutting long-standing services with a meat-ax, and then trying to justify this dollar amount to field a border police force bigger than the armies of more than a few countries behind a modern-day “iron curtain,” is no solution.  Budgets are not just about total dollars; they are also about line-item priorities.  In these tight times, the scale of this proposal does not justify breaking the government’s bank.

For some Americans, the illegal immigration problem is clearly a cover for racially prejudiced immigration such as we have demonstrated in the past.  But for many other Americans, this is a vexing problem pitting a genuine desire to be welcoming to new arrivals against a conflict of conscience regarding how these immigrants came here.  We should not demonize those struggling with this legitimate conflict.  This immigration problem can be solved.  But it requires Americans to face our reality.  And it requires men and women in Congress to forgo their usual political egos and step to the plate, committed to resolving this issue rather than winning points from divided voters.  Give a little; get a lot.  As long as it is a game focused only on speechmaking and winning, on an all or nothing basis, a bad problem will continue to get immorally worse.

There are wins to be had for all by making an invisible community fully employed in jobs needing to be filled, thereby becoming taxpayers for services received on a non-citizenship status.  So far it has been easier to sit back, righteously complain about the problem, and do nothing.  It is time to stop the grandiose but ineffective rhetoric, accept responsibility for our Conservative-Independent-Liberal collective failure, apply a Statute of Limitations to this immigration crime such as we use for far more serious infractions, and all move on with our lives.  Once upon a time America used to solve problems instead of whine about them.  When are we going to solve this one?

©  2014   Randy Bell

Unpaid Debt To Veterans

In the 1770s-1780s, thirteen individual colonies came together to fight a revolution for their independence from England.  To fight that revolution, America’s first national army was created under George Washington, supplementing the thirteen individual state militias.  From their brave actions, independence was achieved, and a (weak) form of national government for “The United States Of America” was first instituted under the Articles of Confederation.

As a show of thanks for the dedication and courage of the soldiers, promises were made.  Many of the soldiers had purchased the promissory securities issued by the states and the Confederation Congress to help finance the war, and were looking to be paid for their show of faith.  In addition, pensions were promised to officers, and bonuses to enlisted men.  And many were given land bounties in government-owned properties as signup bonuses.

All well-intentioned, except that the Confederation Congress had no money, and no power of taxation to raise funds, to make good on these various promises.  Pensions were not funded until 1818, 35 years after the Revolutionary War formally ended, and even then the eligibility criteria were narrowed within the dwindling pool of remaining veterans.  The bonuses never materialized.  And the debt securities and land bounties held by the veterans?  Most veterans sold them off at a discount to financial speculators, believing that they had become worthless.  Those speculators in turn colluded with Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first Treasury Secretary, to have these shaky debts taken over by the new federal government and paid off at full face value.  The veterans got pennies on the dollar; the speculators got dollars on the dollar at a good profit.

And so was established the pattern: after all of the speeches and parades were over, the promises made to those who sacrificed life or body in service to our country would find those promises reneged on the chopping block of “the budget.”

The pattern has continued ever since.  In the boom times of 1924, Congress passed a $500 bonus to our World War I veterans, but not payable until 1945.  After the Great Depression hit, in 1932 thousands of these veterans descended on Washington demanding an earlier payment to help offset their severe economic loss of property and income.  They lived in make-shift shanty encampments around Washington, similar to the many “Hoovervilles” of destitute homeless people springing up around the country.  When Congress refused the payments, President Hoover ordered General Douglas MacArthur to destroy the veteran camps, which he enthusiastically did – active soldiers using tanks and cavalry attacking their unarmed brother veterans.  This bloody incident contributed to Hoover’s massive defeat for reelection four months later.

Franklin Roosevelt, intent on avoiding another “Bonus Army” debacle, worked with Congress in 1944 to pass the G.I. Bill for the forthcoming veterans of World War II.  The bill called for major federal assistance in preferential hiring, educational grants, home mortgage assistance, and continual health care.  This G.I. Bill contributed mightily to America’s 20-year post-war economic boom.  They are programs that continue to this day for the new generations of veterans.

Nevertheless, veterans still have had to fight against institutional resistance to treating the effects of Agent Orange exposures and PTSD in Viet Nam.  Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are having to fight for assistance for more severe cases of PTSD, debilitating long-term injuries that would have meant death in previous wars, and potential diseases and contaminations that have not yet fully surfaced.  But instead of needed health care, what they more commonly get is a bureaucratic runaround, a nightmare of indifference, a callous disregard for these special human beings.  All in the real motivation to protect some administrator’s job and/or some politician’s personal power base.

The only thing “new” about this obscenity are the many claims from all quarters that “we didn’t know there was a problem.”  Living veterans back to WWII, Korea, Viet Nam and forward, can all tell their horror stories with consistency, commonality and regularity.  Stories of a lack of effective service delivery, drowning in paperwork and forms, emphasis on procedure over end result, and priority given to “the system” and the politicians who fund it instead of priority to the veterans.  The scope of problems transcends time and political party and any one leader.

It is easy for one to snap to attention, whip out a snappy salute, say “thank you for your service” while patting an active soldier or veteran on the back, or make a Memorial Day speech at the local National Cemetery.  It is not as easy to put substance into these token images.  Many of the people spreading this rhetorical imagery are the very same people who defend (in hidden background) current Veterans Administration personnel, and vote against the funding needed to fulfill the promises made.  Negative votes because the government supposedly “can’t afford it.”  Such rationalization conveniently forgets that America has NEVER paid cash for any war that it has fought.  Starting with our Revolution, our wars have always been funded by debt.  The entire Iraq/Afghanistan wars were funded “off the books” as “special appropriations” to hide their explosive expansion of our federal budget deficit and national debt.  That failure, and the massive and deliberate failure to correctly project the true cost of these wars – in dollars, time, and human casualties – led to the current over-demand on VA services.  It should not have been that hard to foresee, IF the welfare of veterans was truly on the radar of the military establishment, VA administrators, and Congress.

We can, and should, yell at government officials from over the past twelve years for ignoring our commitments and for being a hurdle to needed services.  But let us avoid the easy political finger-pointing that “Bush did that,” or “it’s all Obama’s fault”; that rhetoric will cause no real action to get done.  Responsibility for such near-criminal conduct is spread all over Washington, to past and present occupants.  Such failure is unfortunately part of our historical tradition.  So let us stop the hypocrisy of patriotic grandstanding versus substantive action.  Do not tell a veteran that we were fine with borrowing money to buy the planes and the tanks and the rifles, but the People who fired those rifles are not worth the same IOUs.  The armaments of war make many people very wealthy.  Fitting a prosthetic onto the stump of a leg does not put much cash into the bank account of either a veteran or his/her VA doctor.

We can argue all we want about lower tax rates, reduced spending, and smaller government.  But the veterans who have made any government possible gave anything but a small commitment.  Follow-up support for our veterans is as much a true “war cost” as was the fighter plane.  We need to step up to the plate, America.  It is a proper bill to be paid that is way past due.

“The Veterans Administration will be modernized … as soon as possible, but I can’t do it immediately.”  (President Harry Truman, May 15, 1945)

 

©  2014   Randy Bell

 

Sharing The Success

For those statistics junkies in the world, there were some very intriguing numbers recently released by several new organizations.  According to Fortune magazine, the average Fortune 500 CEO now makes 331 times as much as their average worker.  This is up from 46 times in 1983, and actually down from 455 times at the peak of the technology boom in 1998.  These are not ratios against starting or bottom-rung salaries, but the average of all salaries.  In dollar and cent terms, “331 times” means that if you are making a “getting-by” salary of $30,000/year, your CEO would be making $9,930,000; if you are making a more reasonable salary of $60,000/year, your CEO would be making $19,860,000.

Another survey by Bloomberg News of 250 of Standard & Poor’s index companies gets more specific.  Comparing CEO pay to average worker salaries in individual industries, Ronald Johnson’s $53M salary at JC Penney leads the pack with pay “1795 times” the $29,688 average salary for general merchandise stores.  (JC Penney has spent the last several years trying to stay one step ahead of bankruptcy, so this salary seems even more extremely unfathomable.)  Even Michael Duke, CEO of the oft-villainized Wal-Mart, is “only” #18 on the list with a “611 times” ratio.  The entire list of 250 companies makes for some interesting reading.

Even in this era of staggering CEO pay and golden parachute firings – compensation usually set by fellow CEOs with similar salaries and benefits looking out for each other – “331 times” is hard to comprehend, much less “611 times” for a failing company.  But when corporate revenues are consistently talked about in multi-billion dollar terms, and profits in 8-9 digit millions, it is hard to connect those numbers to the thousand dollar salaries of real-life people.  Then again, when head football coaches make more money than the collective salaries of the state’s governor and the entire cabinet, and baseball players sign $100M contracts, and “celebrities” with little demonstrable creative talent earn fortunes from allowing voyeurs to peer into every moment of their (fictional) personal lives on cable TV, then is it any wonder that we have lost our perspective about the value of real work in this modern American age?

This is not a criticism about individual wealth in America.  Certainly not a criticism of personal success, which is one of the historically and wonderfully notable facets of American’s many enviable stories of human creativity.  Rather, it is a questioning about how much wealth is “enough,” versus an insatiable accumulation that knows no bounds and ultimately can never satisfy its accumulator.  It is a questioning about to what ends one will go in pursuit of that wealth in disregard of ethical and legal boundaries, and the morals of religious teachings.  And it is a questioning about recognizing our obligations and responsibilities to others who join us on our career road, the many who make possible the success of the one.

This is also not an argument for “income redistribution.”  It is a push to acknowledge that a CEO and his/her employees are all in it together.  MUST be in it together.  Because in reality, no CEO succeeds unless the workers on the line, the salesman in the field, the receptionist answering the phone, and the product designers in the lab, are successful in their endeavors.  Because if the product is bad or unreliable, or the service is unresponsive or uncaring, then all the spreadsheets and strategic plans and organizational skills from the CEO will be worthless in generating company profit.

Greed and ego may drive a CEO to great heights in the short term, but it is a dangerous precipice from which to fall over the long haul.  And the employees, shareholders, and customers will be the worse for allowing that kind of self-worldly view to sit at the power pinnacles of America’s companies.  And thereby so we see once proud corporate names that once personified America for generations instead falling by the wayside – witness Sears, JC Penney, AT&T, and numerous automobile brands that once personified the power and allure of American industry.

The truth is, CEOs do not make any products, do not sell products to a customer, do not fix them when they are broken.  A company only survives and thrives by making a sale – and a CEO does not sell anything; employees do.  A CEO’s only real job is ensuring that the right people are in the right place to do the right work for the right people under the right conditions.  And then hope that those folks come through because good decisions have been made.  If a CEO’s pay goes up, it should only be because the corporate profits went up, and as a result, everyone’s pay should go up in the same proportion.  It is not about limiting CEO salaries; it is about sharing that result and reward with everyone who made it possible.  CEO wealth by itself does not make them “job creators” or add much to our GDP, and no company (except badly managed ones) ever went broke raising the minimum wage for their employees.

CEOs deserve higher pay because their actions and decisions affect greater numbers of people and corporate outcomes.  So all salaries are, and should be, proportional to the scope of an employee’s impact – at all levels.  But success and failure is a shared outcome, and should be reflected in shared compensation.  When Ronald Johnson at Penney’s makes 53$M dollars, and Michael Duke at Wal-Mart makes $18M, yet many of their employees must rely on public benefits to feed and clothe their families, then the understanding of this “shared responsibility and mutual interdependency” has clearly been lost.  And the buying public, who are frequently critical of such CEOs and companies, nevertheless implicitly supports this blind callousness as a result of their continued shopping decisions.

There is a prayer some say at mealtimes in which the diners acknowledge “the ten thousand people” who made that meal possible.  That prayer serves to remind us of all the many who came together for our benefit in order to provide that simple slice of bread on our plate.  So also the thousands who made possible that CEO’s success, such as one’s parents and family; the friends throughout life; the many teachers, and the taxpayers who funded the free, public education; the mentors, and the good, caring managers who encouraged and promoted; the indirect contributors who provided the raw materials and infrastructure needed by the company; all of the aforementioned employees; and so many forgotten others.  We do and should recognize and acclaim the successful go-getter and entrepreneur who creates something from nothing, advances one’s personal status, and  achieves great personal triumphs.  America has always rightly admired and benefited from such people – the theoretical “self-made person.”  But when a CEO forgets where s/he came from, and that “lone rangers” and never truly “lone,” then admiration equally deservedly goes down.  Financial failure then lurks around every corner, and spiritual bankruptcy replaces the illusion of “success.”  No amount of money can buy back that kind of bankruptcy of character.

“When you drink the water, don’t forget those who dug the well.”     (Chinese proverb)

© 2014   Randy Bell

Unaffirming Affirmative Action

In the latest Supreme Court ruling on social issues, the Court ruled 6-2 that Michigan voters did have a right to pass a state constitutional amendment prohibiting the use of Affirmative Action (AA) (i.e. racial preferences) in state higher education admission decisions.  It was not an amendment precluding AA in other higher education matters – employment, promotion, etc. as implied by many news media.  The Court did not rule on the use of AA per se, but only on the technical question of whether Michigan voters had the right to limit it in this manner.  This ruling follows several recent rulings overturning other long-standing tools enacted during the 1960s/70s to compensate for years of structural and legalized discrimination in America.

From the beginning, Americans have always struggled with the idea of AA – the concept of giving priority to one group of Americans over another.  “Racial preferences” has always covered over a reality of “reverse discrimination,” smacking of “two wrongs do not make a right.”  But AA came after a hundred years of shutting out African-Americans from equal access to schools, jobs, services and accommodations, even after being “freed” from 225 years of slavery.  It sought to force open doors of access in order to quickly catch up and rebalance that inequity.  The expectation was that, once rebalanced, we could then move ahead in a normally stabilized manner – just as a ship that is listing in the water must first right itself before it can successfully cruise forward.

However difficult it may have been to accept philosophically, or to acknowledge and pay for “the sins of our fathers,” AA has worked.  Our country is now more diversified in structure and affiliations than any country in the world.  Corporate employment, political offices, public images, and yes, college campuses, reflect a diversity unthinkable when I was young.  And not just for African-Americans, but for other races, gender, and sexual orientations.  It is no longer just a white, man’s world anymore – and that scares the hell out of many people.

Part of the legal discussion about racial/equality issues is that “times have changed,” that conditions in America have changed dramatically since mechanisms like the Voting Rights Act, AA, and school busing were originally enacted.  So, some believe, there is a need to update the law and processes to reflect current reality.  But is racism in America truly eliminated and dead, as some commentators and politicians claim?

No, racism is not dead, though it is certainly in deep decline, working its way into irrelevance.  As each generation attached to the past dies off, and each new generation comes along with no memories of the “Whites Only” signs, the direction is clear.  But ever so often, we are still reminded that we have a way to go.  Whether it be George Zimmerman, the self-appointed vigilante and executioner in Florida; or perhaps Cliven Bundy, the free-loading cattle grazer who Negroes were better off as slaves because they learned to pick cotton and stayed off of government assistance; or Donald Sterling who views his NBA basketball team akin to a southern planation, yet does not want any black players anywhere near him.  No, racism is not dead, and these kind of people remind us of more work to be done.  Work we will do.  But the overwhelming negative public condemnation to these acts and words helps us to affirm that we have made major collective progress as a culture and a community.

So how should we go forward in this changed environment and our different circumstances?  It is clear that the courts, if not the general population, is becoming less tolerant of the old ideas for remedying an even older problem.  Even as one may decry the appearance on its face of a reduced commitment to fighting racism and discrimination, is there some truth, even justification, in rethinking the appropriate tools for this fight?

Voting law preapprovals, school busing, AA, etc. were all instituted as corrective tools, not a way of American life.  Their goal was always to move America to being a colorblind community, with the expectation that their success would inherently invalidate the need for these tools.  America will always have some percentage of Donald Sterlings and Cliven Bundys.  But perhaps we should accept the benefits of our interim successes, and now move to a new legal and cultural plateau.  A plateau where “corrective rebalancing” actions are not where our priority should be, versus giving all Americans the ongoing legal tools for punitive action where proven violations of discrimination occur.  A plateau that focuses on punishing the guilty instead of the wide swath of the innocent.

The reality is, beyond the decreasing percentage of true racists in our American community, our biggest issue of discrimination is not race, it is economic.  It is poverty and the lack of career advancement that create most of today’s social issues, crossing issues of race, gender, religion and birthright.  50 years after Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty, we have much to show for our efforts against racism, but not as much headway against poverty – the homeless, the destitute, the infirm, the insufficiently-educated, and the working poor.  Which leaves too many Americans – black, white, Latino, older, female – in fear of their well-being and stymied by those who have more.  And angry at public institutions and politicians across the spectrum who are seen as perpetuating, if not exacerbating, their diminishing economic position.

I am not speaking naively about where we are.  But we are not where we were.  Nor are we yet where we want to be.  Yet perhaps it is time to let our gains take even deeper roots, solidify even stronger, let what has worked yield its full rewards.  To move away from special mechanisms in favor of universal mechanisms.  To a mindset that knows that diversity in thought and association provides each of us with a far richer life.  We need to concentrate our attention and efforts on the front end of the equality pipeline.  On the root causes of our problems.  On the economic and educational opportunities at the beginning of people’s lives.  Thereby, leaving punitive force to legal remedies and, more importantly, to the very great weight and force of public opinion – as so well demonstrated in these recent weeks.  This is not a liberal perspective; it is not a conservative perspective.  It is simply the next appropriate step in the maturing of America.  Let us be as energetically committed to this collective adult maturity as we were to our collective adolescence.

©   2014   Randy Bell